From Jazz Wax, here’s a nice piece about Thelonious Monk’s Genius of Modern Music Vol. 2, recorded for Blue Note in 1952. The album included the first recordings of the horrifying Skippy, the underplayed Hornin’ […]
Transcription: Zigaboo Modeliste – Stay Away
Another older transcription, Zigaboo Modeliste on Stay Away by the Meters. This one has a lot of fills. Get the pdf
4:3 metric modulation in jazz
Here’s a little thing I put together to develop the 4:3 cross rhythm/metric modulation in jazz. Normally you actually want to explain an advanced concept like this, but really, if you don’t recognize it right […]
How fast can you take your time?
The Discipline of DE, from William S. Burroughs’ Exterminator!, reprinted in it’s entirety via Melancholia, which appears to be a Dutch literary blog. For me this is right up there with Zen in the Art […]
Drum roll, please…
My best drum roll story: playing an 8 AM party on Christmas in Hong Kong for about a thousand Chinese children. The emcee let us know through a combination of broken English and strange hand […]
Know your paint: Prussian blue
I have no idea what got me thinking about this, as I haven’t been painting recently, but it’s my blog so what the hell: Prussian blue is an earthy, ferric-looking blue that reminds me of […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes – Morpheus
That does it- I may just switch over to an all-transcription blog- it probably took me less time to do this transcription than it will take to write an intro that doesn’t make me sound […]
Jo Jones in the ’70’s
I stumbled across this piece about Papa Jo Jones late in his career, at Michael Steinman’s Jazz Lives. Steinman was able to speak to Jones and see him perform a number of times during that […]
Transcription: Sly Dunbar intros
Here’s a project I had been meaning to tackle for awhile- a compilation of Sly Dunbar lead-ins. These are all taken from Serge Gainsbourg’s album, Aux Armes Et Caetera, which is like a reggae drumming […]
Jon Christensen solo
Via Trap’d, here’s a solo by Jon Christensen: He has always struck me as being sort of the Billy Higgins of the ECM era- egoless-seeming, non-pyrotechnic. I’m working on a transcription of one of his […]